Helen Bamber, Therapist to Torture Victims, Dies at 89

Helen Bamber, before the New York showing in 2009 of the art installation “Journey,” which depicts human trafficking.

Stan Honda / Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

August 27, 2014

Helen Bamber, whose volunteering to comfort broken survivors of a Nazi concentration camp when she was 19 inspired her to devote her next seven decades to helping more than 50,000 victims of torture in 90 countries, died on Aug. 21 in London. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British charity.

Started in 2005, the organization grew out of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which Ms. Bamber started in 1985. The foundation emerged from the Medical Group of the British Section of Amnesty International, which she and a small group of colleagues began in the early 1970s. The actress Emma Thompson is the current president of the Bamber foundation.

Together, through a “holistic” combination of medicine and psychological, social and physical therapies, the organizations have helped torture victims recover a sense of identity and purpose after being subjected to often unspeakable horrors: electrical shocks to genitals, beatings on the bottom of feet, nonlethal hangings.

Ms. Bamber recalled listening to a 10-year-old Bosnian girl describe seeing Serb soldiers cut off her brother’s testicles. A mother recounted the beheading of her son.

Ms. Bamber said the worst toll of torture was psychic — “the act of killing a man without dying,” a survivor once told her. Torture, she wrote in an autobiography for her foundation, constitutes “a total perversion of all that is good in human relationships.”

“It is designed to destroy not only the physical and psychological integrity of one individual, but with every blow, with every electrode, his or her family and the next generation,” she continued. “The body betrays and is often discarded, a body to be hated for its scars and injuries, a body which is a constant reminder even if there are no scars or remaining injuries.”

Her approach was to treat the whole person, often in group therapy, which she saw as giving alienated victims a sense of community. She recruited dozens of professionals to treat more than 2,000 victims a year, and worked with many patients herself as a psychotherapist — which she became through experience, she said, rather than an academic degree.

Her method involved revisiting victims’ worst horrors and letting them “vomit” them out.

“You have to move into the torture chamber with them,” she told the British newspaper The Observer in 1999. “You almost have to be tortured with them.”

The next step, she told The Irish Times in 1995, is to work with the “noble and good” qualities that can enable a victim to survive. It was enough, she said, to take a victim’s story, hold it and say, “Yes, I believe you.”

She was born Helen Balmuth in London on May 1, 1925, the offspring of an arranged marriage who was often sickly as a girl. Her father, a Jew whose family had fled pogroms in Poland, was obsessed with the rise of Hitler in Germany and read sections of Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” to his family. Her mother, who was also Jewish, wanted her daughter to go to university and become a socialite and sent her to elocution lessons.

Instead she worked briefly as a secretary for the National Association of Mental Health, which treated servicemen returning from World War II. After gaining an insight into psychological trauma there, she defied her mother by joining a Jewish charity initiative to work with Holocaust survivors. She was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she distributed food and clothing to people still there after it had been liberated.

Ms. Bamber felt helpless in alleviating suffering, she told The Observer in 2008, but she realized that she could contribute simply by listening to people tell their stories. She promised them she would not let their stories die. “It took me a long time to realize that that was all I could do,” she said.

After two and a half years at Bergen-Belsen, she returned to Britain and worked with children who had survived the camps. She found she could nudge them toward feeling better by helping them recover their good memories of early childhood. An effective tactic was to ask them to remember their favorite food.

In 1947 she married Rudi Bamberger, who had seen his father beaten to death by Nazis. He changed his name to Bamber because he thought it sounded more British. The couple, who divorced after 23 years of marriage, had two sons, Jonathan and David, who survive her, as does a granddaughter.

Ms. Bamber had worked as a hospital administrator and as an assistant to an orthopedic surgeon when, in 1958, she heard reports that the French were using torture in the war for independence in Algeria. When Amnesty International was formed in 1961 to publicize the plight of prisoners of conscience, she joined the organization and rose to be chairwoman of the British branch. In 1974, she helped found Amnesty International’s medical group and was appointed secretary.

She and others left Amnesty International to set up the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1974. They wanted to go beyond documenting abuses to treating them, using many of the techniques she had learned at Bergen-Belsen. The foundation, which has helped torture victims from Sri Lanka to Chile, was renamed Freedom From Torture in 2011.

At 80, Ms. Bamber began the foundation named for her in order to address other human rights violations, like human trafficking and gender-based violence, in addition to torture.

The European Union of Women named her a European Woman of Achievement in 1993, and in 1997 she was admitted to the Order of the British Empire. More recently she helped the actor Colin Firth prepare for his role in the 2013 film “The Railway Man” as a British soldier who is tortured by the Japanese in World War II.

She retired last year after a series of strokes.

In 1993, Ms. Bamber went to Israel to testify on behalf of a Palestinian prisoner who she determined had been tortured. In studying his travail, she sat for an hour wearing a hood like the one officers had put over the prisoner’s head while he was interrogated. She said she gagged and felt panicked.

She told The Observer that it had hurt her to accuse Israel, the state founded by fellow Jews, of torture. Afterward, she said, a man came up to her and told her, “With friends like you, who needs enemies?”

But it was the memory of the Holocaust that propelled her lifelong mission, she said. She remembered arriving at Bergen-Belsen after piles of bodies had been buried. A strange, sickly smell lingered. It reminded her of geraniums. She asked what it was. “Death,” someone said.

In a 2012 biography, “Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty,” Neil Belton wrote that she kept geraniums in pots on the terrace of her London apartment — “for no reason that she can really articulate: the need to forget, the wish to remember.”